Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Researchers use high tech in mould watermark to protect plastic products from piracy

28.03.2008

Researchers at WMG at the University of Warwick have devised a high tech way to add Anti-counterfeiting to plastic products as they are created in the moulding process. The process could cost less than one per cent of the total cost of manufacturing the product.

Lead researcher Professor Gordon Smith said:"There is an enormous amount of interest in anti-counterfeiting technology for plastic products. We at the University of Warwick are working on several processes to prevent plastic components being copied and this 'in mould' process is the first of them to be developed for use."

"For commercial reasons we cannot detail collaborators but we are now exploring its use with one company that is plagued by the failure of a counterfeit plastic based safety critical product which is made to look exactly like their safety critical product and therefore damages their reputation as well as losing them sales."

The watermark is created as an intrinsic part of the plastic product as it is being moulded. It would require very detailed technical knowledge and equipment to even attempt to replicate the watermark process.

Professor Smith expects that the new technology will be of significant interest to a range of manufacturer’s products such as DVD s and other discs in the entertainment and computing markets to plastic containers used by a range of consumer industries.

Tiny pores at a cell's entryway act as miniature bouncers, letting in some electrically charged atoms--ions--but blocking others. Operating as exquisitely sensitive filters, these "ion channels" play a critical role in biological functions such as muscle contraction and the firing of brain cells.

To rapidly transport the right ions through the cell membrane, the tiny channels rely on a complex interplay between the ions and surrounding molecules,...

The miniaturization of the current technology of storage media is hindered by fundamental limits of quantum mechanics. A new approach consists in using so-called spin-crossover molecules as the smallest possible storage unit. Similar to normal hard drives, these special molecules can save information via their magnetic state. A research team from Kiel University has now managed to successfully place a new class of spin-crossover molecules onto a surface and to improve the molecule’s storage capacity. The storage density of conventional hard drives could therefore theoretically be increased by more than one hundred fold. The study has been published in the scientific journal Nano Letters.

Over the past few years, the building blocks of storage media have gotten ever smaller. But further miniaturization of the current technology is hindered by...